The Hungry Dead

by John Russo

  Her anxiety increased when she approached a stretch where the road was rather thickly wooded on both sides. But she had to get past this if she expected to walk the rest of the way home. It was here that Luke and Abraham leaped upon her, punching at her and knocking her to the ground. They had concealed the van in a narrow cul-de-sac some distance away so they could pounce on the girl from cover, on foot. The sudden ferociousness of their attack was overpowering, giving Sharon no chance to fight back or flee. They stood back momentarily, leering at her, taking sadistic enjoyment out of her feeble attempt to crawl away. Eggs were smashed all over the blacktop pavement. Sharon’s breath was knocked out of her; she was badly hurt, nearly unconscious, and terrified. Seeing her struggling to crawl on her hands and knees, Abraham lashed out and kicked her in the ribs, sending her sprawling on her face. With excruciating, blinding pain, her right cheekbone smacked and scraped against the pavement. Abraham drew back his boot to kick her again.

  “Easy, now!” Luke shouted. “Don’t want to kill this one, or Mama will have her dander up for sure.”

  Abraham produced a coil of nylon rope from his hip pocket, and he and Luke rolled Sharon over onto her back to get her trussed up. In her delirium she continued to whimper and moan, reduced to quavering helplessness from the punishment she had taken. The two men tightly bound her wrists and ankles. Then they carried her to the waiting van, the rear door wide open, a wire-mesh dog cage inside. Luke and Abraham hoisted Sharon by her wrists and ankles, as if she were trussed-up dead meat. Kneeling on the floor of the van, Luke gagged her by tying a large red bandanna over her mouth. Then she was put into her cage and the door was locked. She had no cognizance of this, for she had passed out.

  Luke jumped into the cab of the van. Abraham closed the rear door, then hopped into the cab on the passenger’s side. The van eased out of the cul-de-sac onto the narrow blacktop road and drove away.

  “Should have raped her,” Abraham said, the memory of his thwarted desire for Gwen and Nancy still fresh in his mind.

  “Nope,” Luke squelched. “This one could be a virgin, the kind Mama and Cynthia need.”

  “What about us?” said Abraham.

  Luke didn’t answer him but stepped on the gas and sped down the sunlit road.

  CHAPTER 12

  On Good Friday, Nancy, Gwen, and Sharon were moved out of the Barnes house. In their cages they were loaded into the van by Luke and Abraham, who then drove the vehicle across the field to the chapel, hoisted the caged girls out one at a time, and carried them into a roomy office that had been partitioned off from the main part of the church. Ten years ago when Uncle Sal used the chapel as his studio, the office was where he relaxed, met with some of his clients, or worked on his ledgers of accounts payable and receivable. Now the former office was crammed full of easels, palettes, and unfinished paintings of bygone Americana. Sal’s large mahogany desk and tall black filing cabinets were pushed against one wall. Against another wall, Nancy and Gwen and Sharon were deposited in their cells of wire mesh. Huffing from exertion, Luke and Abraham went out, slamming the door and locking it behind them.

  The girls examined their new surroundings. There was one window in the office, but the cages were too low to the floor for the prisoners to see out, except for a tantalizingly restrictive view of unbudded tree branches and clear blue sky. Since it was getting on toward noon, the sun beat down hard on the tarpaper roof, and motes of dust danced in yellow rays slanting through the solitary window. One of the white plaster walls had an outline drawn in chalk where Sal had intended to cut another window. The closed-in air was musty and hot. The three girls fidgeted and perspired, cramped in their cages, trying to find the best way to position themselves so their injuries wouldn’t hurt so much. The discomfort of their prison added to their distress.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” Sharon asked. Like Nancy and Gwen, she had been stripped down to her underwear. Her ribs were bruised ugly shades of blue and yellow and her lower lip was split, caked with blood. Her left eye was black, swollen shut. She had remained unconscious all through the night and now had a frightful headache, which made her worry about the possibility of a concussion or skull fracture.

  Gwen felt sorry for Sharon, and Nancy, too, for that matter. “We have to try to get out of here,” Gwen said. The change of environment had rekindled in her the desperate hope of a new chance for escape; maybe there was something the Barnes brothers had overlooked.

  “You must be losing your mind,” said Nancy. “There’s no way.”

  “We can’t give up,” Gwen insisted. Her eyes kept moving from side to side and up and down, trying to spot something that could be turned to their advantage. One factor that was against them was time. People had made miraculous escapes from prisons when they had years to dig secret tunnels or file through bars. But how much could be done in a day?

  “Why are they keeping us here?” Sharon pleaded.

  “They’re going to kill us,” Gwen said flatly. “That’s why we have to escape. They murdered my sister and Nancy’s two friends.”

  “Oh, God!” Sharon cried disbelievingly.

  “They’re not necessarily going to kill us,” Nancy said. “After all, we don’t really know what their rituals are like.”

  “Let me tell you something,” Gwen said sternly. “My grandfather survived the Nazi concentration camps. Six million people were put to death, and most of them went passively to the gas chambers, willing to believe the lie that they were only going to take showers. They didn’t want to face their deaths, and so they died without trying to resist, making it ridiculously easy for the SS butchers. Cynthia and her brothers mean to kill us after they’ve had their fun. Don’t paralyze your will to survive by deluding yourself otherwise.”

  “Why is this happening?” cried Sharon, tears streaming down her cheeks from both eyes, even the blackened, swollen one, which had seemed puffed shut enough to lock the tears in.

  “Because they’re crazy,” said Gwen. “No other reason. So try to think of a way out of here.”

  “God is punishing us,” blurted Nancy.

  Gwen looked at her in amazement.

  “Jesus showed us that sins must be paid for in suffering,” Nancy said feverently. “Going to confession seemed hard, but it was too easy. I thought my soul was cleansed. But a heavier penance was required. I understand that now, and I can accept it. I’m not going to be like that priest Cynthia told us about who renounced his faith in the end and went to hell.”

  “Oh, brother!” exclaimed Gwen. “Listen, Nancy. You probably weren’t particularly religious before. Now you’ve succumbed to despair and you’re clutching at anything that can make you believe your suffering has a purpose. It has none. Turning the other cheek won’t help you—it will only make it easier for your enemies by blunting your instinct for survival. You’re right where they want you—under their power!”

  Nancy did not argue. Curled up on the floor of her cage, she turned her face to the wall to avoid further communication with Gwen, as if Gwen’s ideas instead of the Barnes family were the enemies that might pollute her soul.

  “Even some of the Nazi war criminals condemned at Nuremberg became religious before they were hanged for their atrocities,” Gwen stated. “The sudden acquisition of deep faith is a common reaction of all sorts of people under stress. Charles Colson, for example.”

  “I’m religious, too,” interjected Sharon, in case God was up there listening. “I’m not an atheist, like you seem to be, Gwen. But I’m not giving up, either. Maybe my daddy will come looking for me or call the sheriff or something. In the meantime, what can we do to help ourselves?”

  “I don’t know right off,” Gwen admitted. “Look around for something in here that might give you an idea. Come on, Nancy—help out. I want to see my daughter Amy again. And your mother still loves you, doesn’t she, despite your stepfather?”

  But Nancy didn’t respond. She had started praying another rosary, and rather than answering Gw
en, she kept praying doggedly without moving her lips, saying the words to herself. The repetition of the familiar prayers almost took her mind off the feeling that she might as well die, anyway, because nobody in this world really cared about her. The shocks of the past few days had broken her spirit.

  “Is that a palette knife under the desk chair?” asked Sharon, suddenly perking up.

  She and Gwen leaned to one side of their cages and peered out anxiously. Nancy did not stir. “I believe it is,” said Sharon, squinting at the knife out of her one good eye. Her cage was the closest one to it.

  “Take your bra off,” Gwen suggested. Seeing Sharon’s puzzlement, she explained: “I’ll take mine off, too, and pass it to you. By tying them together, maybe you can fish the knife out from under the chair and pull it close enough to grab it.”

  Sharon looked doubtful. “How far away is the knife?” she asked. “Looks like four or five feet to me, but my depth perception is not so hot because of my swollen eye.”

  “You’re right,” Gwen said dolefully. “About four feet. We’ll never reach it without something long and stiff. Still, we may as well try. We’ve got nothing to lose.”

  The two girls took off their bras and Gwen managed to pass hers to Sharon, who tied the two together and made a loop at one end. But the gauge of the wire mesh was such that she could only stick her fingers out through the tiny steel bars. This prohibited her from getting enough finger or hand movement to fling the tied-together bras very far. She tried dropping them to the floor outside her cage and then crouching down and blowing hard at them in an attempt to force them out toward the knife. But the cloth material was too heavy, and no matter how hard she blew, it would barely budge. “Darn it!” she cried in exasperation, rocking back on her haunches, out of breath.

  “Well, you tried,” Gwen said consolingly, still trying to think of some way to make the attempt work.

  Just then there was a loud ferocious rapping on the windowpane and Sharon looked up and screamed. Gwen stared, wide-eyed. Cyrus was out there, pressing his red beefy face against the glass, leering and giggling for all he was worth over his delicious eyeful of the nearly naked young girls. They covered themselves hastily with their ragged blankets. Cyrus stayed at the window for a long time, jabbering and pointing and carrying on, his nose and cheeks caked with window dirt he had rubbed away by pressing his face against the pane.

  Gwen said, “He can’t come in here . . . I don’t think. He probably doesn’t have a key.”

  Cyrus kept staring, spittle drooling from his thick, leering lips.

  Nancy kept praying, stifling her terror. Through it all she hadn’t made a move.

  “He’s so creepy,” said Sharon, shuddering. She averted her good eye from Cyrus in the hopes that ignoring him would make him go away. Gwen did likewise, and eventually this seemed to work. When they no longer sensed his presence at the window, they turned and looked and saw with relief that he was gone.

  Sharon passed Gwen’s bra over to her and they both put their garments back on. Silently, they resumed checking out their prison, looking for a way to escape. Every now and then their eyes traveled to the out-of-reach palette knife, just a few feet away on the concrete floor. It was the only glimmer of something usable. But it might as well be on the moon. It wasn’t much of a weapon, anyway, Sharon told herself ruefully. Gwen never had thought of it as a weapon, though. She figured that if they could get hold of it somehow, they could maybe jimmy the padlocks on their cages.

  Outside, for the next couple of hours, there were sounds of hammering and sawing. Cyrus was hard at work, making three coffins.

  CHAPTER 13

  On Friday afternoon Morgan Drey drove through Cherry Hill slowly, looking for a place to eat and a place to stay. After a couple of futile stops, he found that the hotels were booked solid and other places of business, including restaurants, were closed from twelve till three, the hours during which Christ was crucified two thousand years ago. This was the Bible Belt. It was only two o’clock. Not many pedestrians were on the streets, but Morgan noticed quite a few parked cars with out-of-state license plates. Feeling strangely about it, he realized that Cynthia’s prattle about a congregation must have a basis in reality; the booked-up hotels and out-of-state cars meant that a large number of people had materialized in this out-of-the-way West Virginia hamlet for the “services” Cynthia had talked about so proudly.

  On the outskirts of town, Morgan spotted something called Bob and Dot’s Motel, a row of ten plain yellow-brick units in no discernible architectural style, set back off the road in a gravel lot adjacent to Bob and Dot’s Bar. There didn’t appear to be a motel manager’s office, so Morgan assumed that guests registered in the saloon. Six automobiles, four with out-of-state plates, were parked in the lot opposite six of the motel units, so maybe there was a vacancy. Morgan went into the saloon to find out. Glancing at his watch, he saw that he still had an hour to go till he could get a couple of hamburgers and some black coffee, unless Bob and Dot were radical enough not to observe Good Friday.

  There was nobody in the saloon except the bartender, a grizzled, sour-faced old man in a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, who was hunching over the bar reading a newspaper. He looked up at the wall clock as Morgan walked in. “Can’t serve you till three, Mister,” he rasped disapprovingly, as if Morgan had committed a sacrilege by merely having food on his mind.

  “I’d like a room in the motel,” Morgan told him placatingly, not looking to get into an argument. “If possible.”

  The old man snorted. “Why in heaven’s name wouldn’t it be possible?” he said irritably. “Didn’t you see the vacancy sign?” he smacked his hand on the bar belligerently.

  “Yes, but that doesn’t always mean there is one,” said Morgan.

  “Ten dollars a night, Mister. Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it,” Morgan said. He paid in advance and without a word of thanks was handed a key to unit six. He didn’t ask about the possibility of food and coffee later, not wanting to prolong his conversation with the feisty old man. He had noticed a menu of items such as chili, stew and Southern fried chicken posted above the bar and hoped these things would become available after three.

  He parked his car in front of unit six and unlocked the door. Surprisingly, the accommodations weren’t bad. The bedroom was clean and there was even a color TV. The bathroom had a glassed-in tub and shower, which was what Morgan was most interested in. After throwing his suitcase on the bed, he got undressed and took a long, hot shower. While the water beat against the nape of his neck, he thought about Cynthia. Now that he was this close to her, his trip to Cherry Hill seemed wildly foolish. Maybe he should get a good night’s rest and drive back to New York, keeping it to himself that he had ever been so impetuous. Anybody who found out about this would laugh at him. Cynthia would probably laugh when he encountered her. What did he expect her to do—fall in love with him? Such things only happened in the movies. In real life these escapades ended in embarrassment and rejection, not in stealing the bride from the altar as Dustin Hoffman did in The Graduate. But Morgan knew he would not turn around and go home. Something inside him always made him see each misadventure through to its vainglorious conclusion. As an anthropologist he was scrupulously logical and rational, but his personal life was often ruled by a flamboyant, quixotic streak he had never been able to repress; sometimes he told himself this was what made him a human being, although a flawed one, rather than a cold, formidable, unapproachable scientist, like several of his more staid colleagues.

  Two days ago he had gotten absurdly drunk in the Greenwich Village bar next door to Cynthia’s shop, and had allowed himself to be picked up by a prostitute, on the theory that it would be good therapy. He had spent the night with her, falling asleep leadenly after a determined effort to blunt his passions and take the edge off his nutty impulse to hop in his car and drive six hundred miles to see Cynthia uninvited. When he awoke in a hotel room, the prostitute was gone and he was badl
y hung over. But he filled himself up with pancakes and coffee and drove all the way down through Pennsylvania in one day. Last night he had stayed in a hotel in Wheeling, West Virginia, and today he had driven the final two hundred miles to Cherry Hill. He was so tired his nerves were on edge, and he couldn’t help having some severe trepidations about the outcome of all this. He still didn’t know exactly where Cynthia lived. He had checked a telephone directory in one of the filled-up hotels where he had tried to get a room, but there was no listing under her last name. His idea was to freshen himself up, get some food into his stomach, and ask around town after three o’clock, when the merchants reopened their doors.

  Lying on his bed in T-shirt and shorts, he fell asleep watching television, and when he awoke it was almost four o’clock. He got into a sweater and slacks and combed his hair, then crossed the parking lot to the bar and found it lively. He liked the smells of coffee, French fries, and chicken. The old man who had checked him in was nowhere in sight, and a much younger fellow was behind the bar, waiting on half a dozen customers. Several tables and booths were filled, too. Country and Western music blared from the jukebox.

  Morgan sat on a barstool, purposely sandwiching himself between two men with whom he might be able to strike up a conversation. These men didn’t look like Cherry Hill residents; instead, they might be out-of-towners here for Cynthia’s services—part of her congregation. If so, they would know how to get to her place.

  The bartender, a stocky, bald-headed man in gray work-clothes, took Morgan’s order for chicken, French fries, cole slaw, and black coffee; it was more than he wanted to eat, but he figured that if he had a substantial meal to linger over it would give him more time to get something going with someone who had the information he was after. In the meantime, trying to be unobtrusive, he checked out the other patrons, who all appeared pretty normal considering the fact that at least some of them were probably indulging in fantasies of witchcraft, sorcery and related hocus-pocus. Maybe their idiosyncrasies were harmless. But Morgan didn’t think so. To him they represented an aberration, a social retrogression that at best encouraged neurosis, and at worst led to schizophrenia. It might already be too late to rescue Cynthia from her delusions.